August 24, 2020
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (hereinafter referred to as “NEDO”), Digital Media Professionals Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “DMP”) and SIGNATE Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “SIGNATE”) will jointly hold the Fourth AI Edge Contest, aiming to discover outstanding computer technologies, human resources and ideas as well as to encourage promising new human resources to enter these fields for the purpose of creating innovative AI edge computing technology.
In this contest, contestants will focus on the subject of image recognition, a technology indispensable for the realization of autonomous driving technology, and compete against each other in processing speed by the preparation of algorithms for segmentation of regions corresponding to target objects at a pixel level and the implementation of the algorithms in hardware. Through holding the contest, the organizers will strive to encourage contestants to master or further cultivate skills that are applicable to high-speed processing in parallel with maintaining accuracy even with limited resources, e.g., data from IoT devices, and will also endeavor to contribute to making AI edge computing technology more popular.
Purpose of the contest
As the arrival of IoT is causing explosive growth in the amount of data generated in society, many industries have been demanding establishment of AI edge computing technology, a technology in which high-level information processing with less power consumption is provided at the “edges” of a network, rather than processing all the data using cloud computing, in order to promote sophisticated utilization of the surging amount of data.
Against this backdrop, METI and NEDO decided to hold the Fourth AI Edge Contest, aiming to discover outstanding computer technologies, ideas and human resources who can play a leading role in implementing these technologies and ideas as well as to encourage promising new human resources to enter these fields for the purpose of achieving innovative AI edge computing technology.
The past AI Edge Contests were held focusing on such subjects as “object detection” and “tracking target objects.” At the fourth contest this time, contestants will compete against each other in processing speed by the preparation of algorithms for segmentation of regions corresponding to target objects at a pixel level taking advantage of images taken by the front camera of a vehicle and the implementation of the algorithms in hardware (FPGA).
In assessing the outcomes of the contest, judges will check contestants’ incorrect actions and other problems as well as the reproducibility of their performance, and based on the results, conduct strict screening to determine the successful award winners. The organizers will recognize such winners and award them extra prizes.
Details of the contest
- Title: Fourth AI Edge Contest
- Organizers: METI and NEDO
- Co-organizers: DMP and SIGNATE
- System for executing the contest: Two committees established by METI and NEDO: Advisory Committee and Steering Committee
- Eligibility requirements: None (all individuals and associations are eligible for entry.)
- Period: From July 1 (Wed.) to December 31 (Thur.), 2020
- Subject of the contest: Image recognition for autonomous driving making use of hardware (FPGA)
